Once Gone

She would arrive any minute now. He knew this from his days of surveillance. It was her job to get the clinic ready for both physicians and patients every morning. The clinic itself didn’t open until eight. Between seven and eight, she was always alone here.

But today was going to be different. Today she would not be alone.

He heard a car pull into the parking lot outside. He adjusted the venetian blinds just enough to look outside. It was her, all right, stepping out of the car.

He had no trouble steadying his nerves. This was not like those first two times, when he had felt so fearful and apprehensive. Ever since the third time, when everything had flowed so smoothly, he knew he had really hit his stride. Now he was seasoned and skillful.

But there was one thing he wanted to do a little differently, just to vary his routine, to make this time a little different from the others.

He was going to surprise her with a little token – his own personal calling card.

* * *

As Cindy MacKinnon walked through the empty parking lot, she mentally rehearsed her daily routine. After getting all the supplies in place, her first order of business would be to sign refill requests from pharmacies and make sure the appointment calendar was up to date.

Patients would be waiting outside the door by the time they opened at eight. The rest of the day would be devoted to sundry tasks, including taking vital signs, drawing blood, giving shots, making appointments, and fulfilling the often unreasonable demands of the registered nurses and physicians.

Her work here as a licensed practical nurse was hardly glamorous. Even so, she loved what she did. It was deeply gratifying to help people who otherwise couldn’t afford medical care. She knew that they saved lives here, even with the basic services that they offered.

Cindy took the clinic keys out of her purse and unlocked the glass front door. She stepped inside quickly and locked the door behind her. Someone else would unlock it again at eight o’clock. Then she immediately punched in the code to deactivate the building alarm.

As she walked into the waiting area, something caught her eye. It was a small object lying on the floor. In the dim light, she couldn’t make out what it was.

She switched on the overhead lights. The object on the floor was a rose.

She walked over to it and picked it up. The rose wasn’t real. It was artificial, made of cheap fabric. But what was it doing there?

Probably a patient had dropped it yesterday. But why hadn’t someone picked it up after the clinic closed at five p.m.?

Why hadn’t she seen it yesterday? She had waited until the cleaning woman was finished. She had been the last to leave and she was sure the rose hadn’t been there.

Then came a rush of adrenaline and an explosion of pure fear. She knew what the rose meant. She wasn’t alone. She knew she had to get out. She didn’t have a split second to lose.

But as she turned to run toward the door, a strong hand seized her arm from behind, stopping her in her tracks. There was no time to think. She had to let her body act on its own.

She raised her elbow and whirled around, throwing her whole weight to the side and back. She felt her elbow strike a hard but pliable surface. She heard a fierce, loud groan and felt the weight of her attacker’s body tilting upon her.

Had she been lucky and hit his solar plexus? She couldn’t turn around to see. There wasn’t time – a few seconds, if even that.

She ran toward the door. But time slowed down, and it didn’t feel like running at all. It felt like moving through thick, clear gelatin.

Finally she reached the door and tried to pull it open. But of course she had locked it after coming inside.

She groped frantically through her purse until she found her keys. Then her hands shook so badly that she couldn’t hold them. They fell clattering to the ground. Time stretched out even further as she bent over and picked them up. She fumbled among the keys until she found the right one. Then she stabbed the key at the lock.

It was useless. Her hand was useless from shaking. She felt as if her body were betraying her.

At last, her eye caught a glimpse of movement outside. On the sidewalk beyond the parking lot a woman was walking her dog. Still gripping the keys, she raised her fists and pounded against the impossibly hard glass. She opened her mouth to scream.

But her voice was stifled by something tight across her mouth, pulling painfully at the corners. It was cloth – a rag or a handkerchief or a scarf. Her attacker had gagged her with merciless and implacable force. Her eyes bulged, but instead of a scream, all she could emit was a horrible groan.

She flailed her arms, and the keys fell again from her hand. She was pulled helplessly backward, away from the morning light into a dark, murky world of sudden and unimaginable horror.

Chapter 16

“Do you feel kind of out of place?” Bill asked.

“Yeah,” Riley said. “And I’m sure we both look it, too.”

A seemingly random mix of dolls and people were seated in the leather-upholstered furniture of the ostentatious hotel lobby. The people – mostly women, but a few men – were drinking tea and coffee and chatting with one another. Dolls of sundry types, both male and female, sat among them like perfectly behaved children. Riley thought it looked like some bizarre kind of family reunion in which none of the children were real.

Riley couldn’t help staring at the odd scene. With no more leads to follow, she and Bill had decided to come here, to this doll convention, hoping she might stumble upon some lead, however remote.

“Are you two registered?” he asked

Riley turned to see a security guard eyeing Bill’s jacket, undoubtedly having detected his concealed weapon. The guard held his hand near his own holstered gun.

She thought that with this many people around, the guard had good reason to worry. A crazed shooter really could wreak havoc in a place like this.

Bill flashed his badge. “FBI,” he said.

The guard chuckled.

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he said.

“Why not?” Riley asked.

The guard shook his head.

“Because this is just about the weirdest bunch of people I ever saw in one place.”

“Yeah,” Bill agreed. “And they’re not even all people.”

The guard shrugged and replied, “You can bet that somebody here has done something they shouldn’t have.”

The man jerked his head to one side then the other, scanning the room.

“I’ll be glad when it’s all over.” Then he strode away, looking wary and alert.

As she wandered with Bill into an adjoining hallway, Riley wasn’t sure what the guard was so worried about. Generally speaking, the attendees looked more eccentric than menacing. The women in view ranged from young to elderly. Some were stern and dour looking, while others seemed open and friendly.

“Tell me again what you hope to find out here,” Bill muttered.

“I’m not sure,” Riley admitted.

“Maybe you’re making too much of the whole doll thing,” he said, clearly unhappy to be here. “Blackwell was creepy about dolls, but he wasn’t the perp. And yesterday we learned that the first victim didn’t even like dolls.”

Riley didn’t reply. Bill might well be right. But when he had showed her a brochure announcing this convention and show, she somehow couldn’t help following through. She wanted to make another try.

The men Riley saw tended to look bookish and professorial, most of them wearing glasses and more than a few of them sporting goatees. None of them appeared quite capable of murder. She passed a seated woman who was lovingly rocking a baby doll in her arms and singing a lullaby. A little farther on, an elderly woman was carrying on a rapt conversation with a life-sized monkey doll.

Okay, Riley thought, so there is a little bit of weirdness going on.

Bill pulled the brochure out of his jacket pocket and browsed it as they walked along.

“Anything interesting happening?” Riley asked him.

“Just talks, lectures, workshops – that kind of thing. Some big manufacturers are here to bring store owners up to date on trends and crazes. And there are some folks who seem to have gotten famous in the whole doll scene. They’re giving talks of one kind or another.”

Then Bill laughed.

“Hey, here’s a lecture with a real doozy of a title.”

“What is it?”

“‘The Social Construction of Victorian Gender in Period Porcelain Dolls.’ It’s going to start in a few minutes. Want to check it out?”

Riley laughed as well. “I’m sure we wouldn’t understand a word of it. Anything else?”

Bill shook his head. “Not really. Nothing to help understand the motives of a sadistic killer, anyway.”

Riley and Bill moved on into the next big open room. It was a gigantic maze of booths and tables, where every conceivable kind of doll or puppet was on exhibit. They ranged from as tiny as a single finger to life size, from antique to fresh out of the factory. Some of them were walking and some were talking, but most of them just hung or sat or stood there, staring back at the viewers who clustered in front of each one.

For the first time Riley saw that actual children were present – no boys, only small girls. Most were under their parents’ immediate supervision, but a few wandered loose in unruly little groups, putting exhibitors’ nerves on edge.

Riley picked up a miniature camera from a table. The attached tag claimed that it worked. On the same counter were tiny newspapers, stuffed toys, handbags, wallets, and backpacks. On the next table were doll-sized bathtubs and other bathroom fixtures.

The T-shirt station printed shirts for dolls and for full-size people, but the hair salon was for dolls only. The sight of several small carefully styled wigs gave Riley chills. The FBI had already found the manufacturers of the wigs from the murder scenes and knew that they were sold in countless stores everywhere. Seeing them lined up like this brought back images that Riley knew that other people here didn’t share. Images of dead women, naked, sitting splayed like dolls, wearing ill-fitting wigs made out of doll hair.

Riley felt sure that those images would never fade from her mind. The women treated so callously, yet so carefully arranged to represent… something she couldn’t quite pin down. But of course that was why she and Bill were even here.

She stepped forward and spoke to the perky young woman who seemed to be charge of the doll-hair salon.

“Do you sell these wigs here?” Riley asked.

“Of course,” the woman responded. “Those are just for display, but I have brand new ones in boxes. Which one would you like?”

Riley wasn’t sure what to say next. “Do you style these little wigs?” she finally asked.

“We can change the style for you. It’s a very small additional charge.”

“What kind of people buy them?” Riley said. She wanted to ask whether any creepy guys had been around to buy doll wigs.

The woman looked at her, wide-eyed. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “All kinds of people buy them. Sometimes they bring in a doll they already have to get the hair changed.”

“I mean, do men often buy them?” Riley asked.

The young woman was looking distinctly uncomfortable now. “Not that I recall,” she said. Then she turned abruptly away to deal with a new customer.

Riley just stood there for a moment. She felt like an idiot, accosting someone with such questions. It was as though she had thrust her own dark world into one that was supposed to be sweet and simple.

She felt a touch on her arm. Bill said, “I don’t think you’re going to find the perp here.”

Riley could feel her face flush. But as she turned away from the doll-hair salon, she realized that she wasn’t the only strange lady that the exhibitors here had to deal with. She almost walked into a woman desperately clutching a newly bought doll, weeping passionately, apparently with joy. At another table, a man and a woman had gotten into a shouting match over which of them would get to buy a particularly rare collector’s item. They were engaged in a physical tug-of-war that threatened to tear the merchandise apart.

“Now I begin to see why that security guard was worried,” she said to Bill.

She saw that Bill was intently watching someone nearby.

“What?” she asked him.

“Check out that guy,” Bill said, nodding toward a man standing at a nearby display of large dolls in frilly dresses. He was in his mid-thirties and quite handsome. Unlike most of the other males here, he didn’t look bookish or scholarly. Instead, he cut the appearance of a prosperous and confident businessman, properly dressed in an expensive suit and tie.

“He looks as out of place as we do,” Bill muttered. “Why is a guy like that playing with dolls?”

“I don’t know,” Riley replied. “But he also looks like he could hire a real live playmate if he wanted to.” She watched the businessman for a moment. He had stopped to look at a display of little girl dolls in frilly dresses. He glanced around, as if to be sure that no one was watching.

Bill turned his back to the man and leaned forward as if talking animatedly with Riley. “What’s he doing now?”

“Checking out the merchandise,” she said. “In a way I really don’t like.”

The man bent toward one doll and peered at it closely – maybe a little too closely – and his thin lips curled up into a smile. Then he again scanned the others in the room.

“Or looking for prospective victims,” she added.

Riley was sure she detected a certain furtiveness in the man’s manner as he fingered the doll’s dress, examining the fabric in a sensuous manner.

Bill glanced at the man again. “Jesus,” he murmured. “Is this guy creepy or what?”

A chilly feeling seized Riley. Rationally, she knew perfectly well that this couldn’t be the murderer. After all, what were the chances of stumbling across him in public like this? Still, at that moment Riley was convinced that she was in the presence of evil.

“Don’t let him get out of sight,” Riley said. “If he gets weird enough, we’ll ask him some questions.”

But then, reality blew those dark thoughts away. A little girl about five years old came running up to the man.

“Daddy,” she called him.

The man’s smile widened, and his face beamed innocently with love. He showed his daughter the doll he had found, and she clapped her hands and laughed with delight. He handed it to her and she hugged it tightly. The father took out his wallet and got ready to pay the vendor.

Riley stifled a groan.

My instincts miss again, she thought.

She saw that Bill was listening to someone on his cell phone. His face looked stricken as he turned toward her.

“He’s taken another woman.”

Chapter 17

Riley cursed under her breath as she pulled into the parking lot beside a long, flat-roofed building. Three people wearing FBI jackets were standing outside, mingling with several local cops.

“This can’t be good,” Riley said. “I wish we’d gotten here before the hordes descended.”

“No joke,” Bill agreed.

They’d been told that a woman had been kidnapped from inside this small-town medical clinic, taken early this morning.

“At least we’re getting on it faster this time,” Bill said. “Maybe we stand a chance of getting her back alive.”

Riley silently agreed. In the earlier cases, no one had known exactly when or where the victim was kidnapped. The women had just disappeared and later turned up dead accompanied by cryptic signs of the killer’s mindset.

Maybe it will be different this time, she thought.

She was relieved that someone had witnessed enough of the crime to call 911. The local police knew about an alert for a serial kidnapper and killer, and they had called in the FBI. They were all assuming that this was the same deviant at work.

“He’s still way ahead of us,” Riley said. “If it’s really him. This is not the kind of place I expected our perp to grab someone.”

She had thought the killer would be stalking a parking garage or an isolated jogging trail. Maybe even a poorly lit neighborhood.

“Why a community clinic?” she asked. “And why in daylight? Why would he take the chance of entering a building?”

“Sure doesn’t seem like a random choice,” Bill agreed. “Let’s get moving.”

Riley parked as close to the taped-off area as she could. As she and Bill got out of the car, she recognized Special Agent in Charge Carl Walder.

“This is really bad,” Riley muttered to Bill as they walked toward the building.

Riley didn’t think much of Walder – a babyish, freckled-faced man with curly, copper-colored hair. Neither Riley nor Bill had personally worked a case under him, but he had a bad reputation. Other agents said that he was the worst kind of boss – someone who had no idea what he was doing, and was therefore all the more determined to throw his weight around and assert his authority.

To make matters worse for Riley and Bill, Walder outranked their own team chief, Brent Meredith. Riley didn’t know how old Walder was, but she was sure that he had risen up the FBI food chain too fast for his own good, or for anybody else’s.

As far as Riley was concerned, it was a classic example of the Peter Principle at work. Walder had successfully risen to the level of his incompetence.

Walder stepped forward to meet Riley and Bill.

“Agents Paige and Jeffreys, I’m glad you could make it,” he said.

Without niceties, Riley went right ahead and asked Walder the question that was nagging at her.

“How do we know it’s the same perp that took the other three women?”

“Because of this,” Walder said, holding out an evidence bag holding a cheap little fabric rose. “It was lying on the floor just inside.”

“Oh, shit,” Riley said.

The Bureau had been careful not to leak to the press that detail of his MO – how he’d left roses at the scenes where he’d posed the bodies. This was not the work of a copycat or of a brand new killer.

“Who was it this time?” Bill asked.

“Her name is Cindy MacKinnon,” Walder said. “She’s an LPN. She was abducted when she came in early to set up the clinic.”

Then Walder indicated the other two agents, a young female and an even younger male. “Perhaps you’ve met Agents Craig Huang and Emily Creighton. They’ll be joining you on this case.”

Bill audibly murmured, “What the – ”

Riley poked Bill in the ribs to shut him up.

“Huang and Creighton have already been briefed,” Walder added. “They know as much about these murders as you do.”

Riley fumed silently. She wanted to tell Walder that no, Huang and Creighton did not know as much as she did. Not even as much as Bill did. They couldn’t know that much without having spent as much time at the crime scenes, or without having spent uncounted hours poring over evidence. They didn’t have anything resembling the professional investment she and Bill had already put into this case. And she was sure that neither of these youngsters had ever summoned up the mind of a killer to get a sense of his experience.

Riley took a deep breath to stifle her anger.

“With due respect, sir,” she said, “Agent Jeffreys and I have got a pretty good handle on it and we’ll need to work fast. Extra help… won’t help.” She’d almost said that extra help would just slow them down, but had stopped herself in time. No point in insulting the kids.

Riley detected a trace of a smirk on Walder’s babyish face.

“With due respect, Agent Paige,” he replied, “Senator Newbrough doesn’t agree.”

Riley’s heart sank. She remembered her unpleasant interview with the Senator and something he had said. “You may not know it, but I’ve got good friends in the upper echelons of the agency.”

Of course Walder had to be one of those “good friends.”

Walder lifted his chin and spoke with borrowed authority. “The Senator says that you’re having trouble grasping the full magnitude of this case.”

“I’m afraid the Senator is letting his emotions run away with him,” Riley said. “It’s understandable, and I sympathize. He’s distraught. He thinks that his daughter’s killing was political or personal or both. It obviously wasn’t.”

Walder squinted his eyes skeptically.

“How is it obvious?” he said. “It seems obvious to me that he’s right.”

Riley could hardly believe her ears

“Sir, the Senator’s daughter was the third woman taken out of what are now four,” she said. “His time frame has been spread out over more than two years. It’s purely coincidence that his daughter happened to be one of the victims.”

“I beg to differ,” Walder said. “And so do Agents Huang and Creighton.”

As if on cue, Agent Emily Creighton piped in.

“Doesn’t this kind of thing happen from time to time?” she said. “Like, sometimes a perpetrator will stage another murder before killing his intended victim? Just to make it look serial and not personal?”

“This last abduction could serve the same purpose,” added Agent Craig Huang. “A final decoy.”

Riley managed not to roll her eyes at the kids’ naiveté.

“That’s an old, old story,” she said. “A work of fiction. It doesn’t happen in real life.”

“Well,” Walder said in an authoritative tone, “it happened this time.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Riley snapped. Her patience had run out. “Have we got any witnesses?”

“One,” Walder said. “Greta Tedrow made the 911 call but she didn’t actually see much. She’s sitting inside. The receptionist is in there too, but she didn’t see it happen. By the time she showed up at eight o’clock, the cops were already here.”

Through the clinic’s glass doors, Riley could see two women sitting in the waiting room. One was a slim woman in running clothes, with a cocker spaniel on a leash beside her. The other was large, middle-aged, and Hispanic-looking.

“Have you interviewed Ms. Tedrow?” Riley asked Walder.

“She’s been too shaken up to talk,” Walder said. “We’re going to take her back to the BAU.”

Riley actually did roll her eyes this time. Why make an innocent witness feel like a suspect? Why play the bully, as if that wouldn’t shake her up even more?

Ignoring Walder’s gesture of protest, she swung a door open and strode through the entrance.

Bill followed her in, but he left the interview to Riley while he checked a couple of adjoining offices, then poked around the waiting room.

The woman with the dog looked at Riley anxiously.

“What’s going on?” Greta Tedrow asked. “I’m ready to answer questions. But nobody’s asking me anything. Why can’t I go home?”

Riley sat in a chair beside her and patted her hand.

“You will go home, Ms. Tedrow, and soon,” she said. “I’m Agent Paige, and I’ll ask you a few questions right now.”

Greta Tedrow nodded shakily. The cocker spaniel just lay there on the floor looking up at Riley in a friendly manner.

“Nice dog,” Riley said. “Very well behaved. How old is he – or is it a she?”

“It’s he. Toby’s his name. He’s five years old.”

Riley slowly held her hand toward the dog. With the animal’s silent permission, she petted his head lightly.

The woman nodded an unspoken thank-you. Riley got out her pencil and notepad.

“Now take your time, don’t rush,” Riley said. “Tell me in your own words how it happened. Try to remember everything you can.”

The woman spoke slowly and haltingly.

“I was walking Toby.” She pointed outside. “We were just coming around the corner beyond the hedges, over that way. The clinic had just come into view. I thought I heard something. I looked. There was a woman in the clinic doorway. She was pounding on the glass. I think her mouth was gagged. Then someone pulled her backward out of sight.”

Riley patted the woman’s hand again.

“You’re doing great, Ms. Tedrow,” she said. “Did you see her attacker at all?”

The woman wrestled with her memory.

“I didn’t see his face,” she said. “I couldn’t see his face. The light was on in the clinic, but…”

Riley could see a flash of recollection cross the woman’s face.

“Oh,” the woman said. “He was wearing a dark ski mask.”

“Very good. What happened next?”

The woman became slightly more agitated.

“I didn’t stop to think. I got out my cell phone and called 911. It seemed like a long time before I could get an operator. I was on the phone talking to the operator when a truck came tearing out from behind the building. Its tires screeched going out of the parking lot, and it turned to the left.”